[Congressional Record Volume 143, Number 120 (Thursday, September 11, 1997)]
[House]
[Pages H7253-H7254]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                           THE NEW WORLD MINE

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Montana [Mr. Hill] is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. HILL. Mr. Speaker, this afternoon I want to visit for a few 
minutes with my colleagues, about a matter that is referred to as the 
New World Mine. Members may be aware of or have heard about this.
  The President asked for $65 million to be inserted in the Interior 
budget under the Land and Water Conservation Fund for the purposes of 
executing an agreement that he entered into on August 12, 1996. This 
was an agreement that was negotiated in secret. It was negotiated 
behind closed doors with representatives of the White House, 
representatives of an environmental group, and representatives of a 
mining company.
  What it basically called for is the exchange of 65 million dollars 
worth of public land in Montana in exchange for the rights to mine a 
project called the New World Mine, which is located about 3 miles 
northeast of Yellowstone Park.
  This caused quite an uproar, Mr. Speaker, in Montana, because the 
people of Montana did not take kindly that the President of the United 
States would be giving away 65 million dollars worth of the public land 
in Montana. Sportsmen's groups, environmental groups, and just ordinary 
citizens who are very used, to and accustomed to, using the public 
lands became very disturbed.
  So the President then decided that he had to come up with another 
alternative, so he proposed taking $65 million out of the Conservation 
Reserve Program. I would remind my colleagues that the Conservation 
Reserve Program is a program that takes environmentally sensitive lands 
out of production and puts them into grasses, and is very popular among 
the environmental community and the sportsmen's community, and has 
helped the farm communities in many parts of the drier parts of the 
West. Again, this group expressed outrage, because those are very 
valuable programs.
  So finally the President came to the Congress and said, give me a 
blank check. Let me execute this arrangement. The House of 
Representatives, Mr. Speaker, said no. It said no because the 
President's plan is fatally flawed. I would like to explain to my 
colleagues why that is. It is fatally flawed for two primary reasons.
  First, the President decided to ignore two very important parties. 
One of those parties is the State of Montana. The other party is a 
woman and her name is Margaret Reeb. Who is Margaret Reeb? It turns out 
that Margaret Reeb is the individual who owns the mineral interests 
that this group of people met together and decided to sell out.
  Mr. Speaker, if I could liken this to an example, it would be like 
having your neighbor come to you and say, you know, someone came to me 
and offered me a lot of money to buy my house, but they said, I will 
not buy your house unless I can get your neighbor's house, too, so your 
neighbor sold your house from underneath you. That is basically what 
happened, because Margaret Reeb was never contacted, she was never 
consulted, and she never made any agreements.
  I will to enter into the Record, Mr. Speaker, a copy of an article, a 
story in Time, May 12, 1997. In it Margaret Reeb says she is not going 
to play ball with the President. She says, ``I knew nothing about'' the 
negotiations. ``When I finally got a copy of the agreement, I 
practically went into shock.'' Had any of the parties approached her, 
she said, she would have informed them, well, I am not interested in 
selling my property.
  At the end of the day, she says, she does not give a damn whether or 
not the thing gets mined, she just wants to keep her property. There is 
a concern with that, because according to this article, Kathy McGinty, 
the chairwoman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, 
says ominously, ``There are other ways for us to arrange this 
agreement,'' suggesting they could leave Margaret Reeb's real estate an 
island in a sea of Government property that would have no value.
  So the secret deal, made behind closed doors, left out the public. 
There were no hearings. The President had no authority and, certainly, 
no appropriation. Even more important, Mr. Speaker, is, it interrupted 
what we call the NEPA process, the National Environmental Policy Act 
process.
  There was an environmental impact statement that was in the process. 
The White House says the environmental impact statement was not near 
completion, but I want my colleagues to look here, because I have a 
copy of the draft, copy of the environmental impact statement, which I 
will not ask to be put in the Record, but it was near completion. That 
environmental impact statement addressed the environmental concerns 
this mine might have represented.
  Why did the President announce on August 12, 1996, this deal, when he 
did not have the property owner even on board? It turns out, Mr. 
Speaker, that August 12, 1996, was the first day of the Republican 
National Convention. The President used this opportunity to upstage the 
convention.
  I am not opposed to it because of that; I am opposed to it because it 
is a wrong deal. The deal is wrong. The deal seeks to steal Margaret 
Reeb's property, and it seeks to hurt the State of Montana. GAO says 
the impacts would be that Montana would lose 321 direct jobs, 145 
indirect jobs, and about 100 million dollars worth of tax revenues, 
should this mine go forward.
  Mr. Speaker, I have offered an alternative plan, a plan that will 
protect Margaret Reeb's property rights and

[[Page H7254]]

protect the taxpayers of Montana, and I urge my colleagues to become 
familiar with it.
  Mr. Speaker, I include for the RECORD the following article.
  The material referred to is as follows:

                       [From Time, May 12, 1997]

                            Nobody Asked Her


 a very human, very stubborn glitch in the Yellowstone gold-mining deal

                          (By Patrick Dawson)

       Margaret Reeb is somewhere in her 80's. In her Livingston, 
     Mont., sitting room stands an ancient upright piano. On a 
     wall hangs a photograph of Reeb and a smiling Eleanor 
     Roosevelt. The topic of her verse--the mountain's beauty, the 
     nobility of the pioneer gold miners who wrested their 
     destinies from it--is a variation on an old frontier theme. 
     Were she merely a wistful ex-schoolteacher, one could dismiss 
     Reeb as a member of a familiar but vanishing species: the 
     Western romantic.
       But as things stand, it would be imprudent. Because Reeb, 
     although she did teach school for decades, does not merely 
     admire the forget-me-nots on the sides of Montana's Henderson 
     Mountain; she owns the rights to millions of dollars in gold 
     ore lying somewhere beneath it. Ore that President Clinton 
     vowed publicly would never be mined. But about which he may 
     have spoken too soon. For Margaret Reeb is not simply the 
     eccentric heroine in her own romantic western. A bona-fide 
     scion of the mining heroes she celebrates, she has the 
     financial leverage to throw a shudder into the massive 
     federal machinery she believes would grind up their dream.
       It has been nine months since Clinton played federal 
     marshal in the Great Yellowstone Mine Shootout. The dispute 
     began in the late 1980s as new techniques for locating pay 
     dirt suddenly turned old claims on Henderson into a $1 
     billion lode of extractable ore. The glitch was that the peak 
     is a scant 2.5 miles upstream from Yellowstone National Park. 
     Environmental groups, warning that a megamine would poison 
     the park's ecosystem, threatened massive lawsuits against 
     Crown Butte, the company planning a round-the-clock 
     extraction effort. Then the Administration stepped in, and 
     after months of secret talks, Crown Butte agreed to swap the 
     mine for $65 million worth of government holdings elsewhere. 
     Clinton was able to upstage the first day of the Republican 
     Convention last August by posing in a beautiful alpine meadow 
     flanked by an environmentalist and a mining executive, 
     announcing that ``Yellowstone is more precious than gold.''
       But a key figure was absent from that photo op. 
     Margaret Reeb spent the summers of her girlhood on 
     Henderson's slopes, where her father supervised a mine. 
     Her family has owned claims in the district for over a 
     century. ``It was gold seekers who settled the West,'' she 
     notes crisply. ``They built the churches; they built the 
     towns.'' Her purchase of dozens of nonproducing Henderson 
     claims over 50 years probably struck some as more 
     sentimental than savvy. But now her holdings, on lease to 
     Crown Butte, constitute at least 40% of its goldfield--a 
     portion so large that the pact is specifically contingent 
     on her selling her rights to the company so that they can 
     be part of the exchange.
       But Reeb will not play ball. ``I knew nothing about the 
     negotiations,'' she claims. ``And when I finally got a copy 
     of the agreement, I practically went into shock.'' Had any of 
     the parties approached her, she says, she would have informed 
     them, ``Well, I'm not interested in selling my property.'' In 
     part the stance is just age-old miner's shrewdness: Don't 
     sell your stake unless it's running out. But her rebuff also 
     reflects a century of skirmishing between Western miners and 
     the feds: ``We Montanans feel pretty strongly about our love 
     of the land,'' she says. ``It is not American to be trying to 
     wipe out selective private property.''
       The head of Crown Butte's new corporate parent has come 
     calling at least twice since August, entreating her 
     cooperation. But Reeb does not seem receptive to his 
     blandishments. David Rovig, a former Crown Butte head who 
     spent years talking her into leasing her claims to the 
     company, doubts she will sell. ``At the end of the day,'' he 
     says, ``Margaret doesn't give a damn whether the thing gets 
     mined or not. She wants her property.''
       That may be all she ends up with. Katie McGinty, the 
     chairwoman of the White House Council on Environmental 
     Quality, says ominously, ``There are other ways for us to 
     arrange this agreement.'' One might involve Crown Butte's 
     swapping only the land it owns, leaving Reeb's real estate an 
     island in a sea of government property. Although her 
     underground holdings are vast, her actual surface lot may be 
     too small to accommodate a large-scale extraction operation.
       Meanwhile, other problems have come up. Since signing the 
     agreement, the Administration has not found any politically 
     acceptable properties for a swap. It may have to try to pry 
     $65 million out of a Republican Congress through deferred 
     agricultural subsidies. By comparison, Margaret Reeb could 
     come to seem a pushover.

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